Claimed (10 page)

***

We ate in the living room, sitting on the couch and balancing our plates on our knees. That was my idea – I wanted to sit and gaze at the festive Christmas tree. “I didn’t get you a present,” I said sadly as we ate.

“You are here,” he replied instantly. “That’s the best present I could get.”

I spotted a package under the tree. “Did you get me something? Seriously, how? What kind of voodoo magic are you capable of?”

He laughed. “You aren’t going to be happy with me when you open it, but I’ve had this package ready to give you for a long time.” He shot me an amused look. “Go ahead, I can tell you are dying to know what it is.”

I was. I put my half-eaten plate of food aside and went to get the gift, ripping off the packaging in a hurry. When I was a child, my mother had taught me to unwrap each gift carefully so that we could reuse the paper, but right now, I was too impatient.

The box contained my Bowie knife, the one I’d used to kill Ivan Klimov. The one I’d taped to the underside of a toilet lid in Bangkok before I’d gone to the auction in which Alexander had bought me.
I had missed that knife.

“You had the hotel searched?” I asked ruefully. It rankled that he’d always been a step ahead of me.

“To be fair,” he said, in an effort to placate me, “had I not recognized you, we wouldn’t have made the effort to find your room. That wasn’t easy.”

No, it wouldn’t have been. There were a lot of hotels on Khao San Road and I’d never mentioned which one to any of Madame Lorraine’s staff.

“This was your present?” I raised an eyebrow. “Very romantic.”

He smiled. “There’s one more,” he said. He set down his plate. “Come here.” He pulled me down onto his lap, my back to his chest. “Lean forward, cherie,” he instructed. “And close your eyes.”

I did as he told me, fighting the urge to peek. I felt his fingers brush my hair aside and then he fastened something around my neck. “Open now,” he said.

I gazed in shock at the large yellow diamond pendant that nestled between my breasts. It was the same pendant he’d loaned me the last time I’d been in Paris. At that time, he’d told me not to lose it, telling me the insurers would be very unhappy if something happened to it. “Alexander,” I whispered, turning around to stare at him, “isn’t this valuable enough to be insured?”

“Mmm,” he replied with an infuriating grin. “And there’ll probably be tax implications as well. We should chat with my accountant just to make sure all of that is taken care of.”

“Alexander,” I tried again. He was crazy. At least when he deposited a million dollars in my account, it was an attempt to make up for what his father had done and it helped me get established in my new life. But this gift was entirely over the top. “You can’t give me such a valuable present.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Really?” he asked politely. “Again, an attempt to tell me what to do.” He shot me a dry look. “Are you planning to learn this lesson anytime soon, Ellie? I have the feeling you are enjoying your spankings a bit too much. Perhaps withholding orgasms is a better way to go.”

I gave up. If he wanted to shower me with jewelry, that was his problem. I’d voiced my protest, but he was right – I couldn’t actually tell him how to spend his money. “Thank you, I guess,” I said wryly, fingering the pendant. “It is very beautiful.”

He laughed. “So you don’t want to get punished then, Ellie?” he asked. “What a pity.”

“Oh, I didn’t say that,” I responded. “Shall we? I have memories of this bedroom that I’m anxious to revisit.”

In Abeokuta, I was going to want kindness from him, not dominance. But tonight, I wanted everything he had held back. In the safety of this house in Saint Denis, the scene of the first night I spent in his arms, I wanted to be Alexander’s submissive. I wanted to wrap his love and his warmth around me like a blanket, and hope it was enough to sustain me through the next few days.

Ellie:

We both flew under assumed identities. My fake passport identified me as Nadia Mitchell, an American national who was a French resident. Alexander was my husband, Dominic Mitchell. I ignored the pang in my heart when I saw that. Marriage seemed so normal and so far away, especially when the plane was taking me back towards a place that I thought I’d left forever.

Alexander eyed me carefully. Last night, I’d burst into uncontrollable tears half-way through our session, tears that I couldn’t seem to stop from streaming down my cheeks. He’d quickly untied the ropes and cuffs that had tethered me and he’d scooped me into his arms, rocking me back and forth until I finally calmed down. Then he’d gone downstairs and fetched ice-cream from the refrigerator. “Will that help?” he’d asked quietly, concern etched in his gaze and I had to giggle. Of course, because it was Alexander, the ice-cream wasn’t some cheap grocery store brand. It was a tub from
Berthillon
, which was widely considered to be the best ice-cream in Paris.

Now, I knew that he was seriously re-evaluating taking me to Nigeria. I needed to nip this in the bud. “You have that look,” I said sternly, glaring at him.

“What look?”

We showed the immigration officials our passports and cleared the security line. Charles de Gaulle airport teemed with people from all over the world. Families flying home for Christmas, lovers who thought a winter in Paris would be romantic. I wished fervently that our lives were that simple.

“The ‘I’m about to make some kind of unilateral decision concerning my girlfriend even though she’s warned me not to do that’ look,” I responded. “I’m on to you, Alexander.”

He started to chuckle. “Okay,” he raised his hands in defense. “I was thinking that you shouldn’t have to endure this. Bectell is gunning for me, not you.”

“Tell me something,” I gritted out. “If the situation was flipped around, would you leave me to Lucien’s mercy?”

No, of course he wouldn’t.
I had him there. “I can fire guns. I can throw knives. I might not be the best deep-cover operative but I can take care of myself. And I am not leaving you.” My voice lowered to voice the threat. “Are we clear?”

He could have said something about my tears from last night, but he didn’t. Instead, he grinned easily at me. “Yes ma’am,” he quipped before turning serious. “I would gladly walk into a fight with you, Ellie,” he said. “But from personal experience, I recognize that emotional trauma is different.” He kissed my lips. “I wouldn’t think any less of you if you don’t want to come with me.”

“You can’t get rid of me that easily,” I replied.

In the crush of anxiety about going back to Nigeria, the fact that somehow Lucien seemed privy to Alexander’s movements had receded to the background, but as we got closer to the gate, that fact dominated my thoughts once again. Jean-Luc had taken Pavel and Katrina to Lagos. It didn’t escape me that these two were also with Alexander in Hanoi.

Based on the length of the time they had known each other, Jean-Luc was not a suspect, but these two I didn’t know and I didn’t trust. Alexander kept insisting that they wouldn’t betray him, but until Lucien had been apprehended, I was about to be so suspicious that Jean-Luc’s paranoia would pale in comparison.

***

Alexander:

The British Airways first class cabin on this particular plane model was configured so that each of our seats would fully recline to be beds, but thankfully, also positioned in a way that we were sitting side by side, and could converse without being overheard. Once we’d taken our seats, she turned to me with a teasing smile. “Remember how we had sex on the plane when we flew from Bangkok to Paris?”

My lips twitched. “It’s a little easier on the private jet,
cherie
,” I said.

She laughed. “I wasn’t necessarily suggesting it,” she replied. “I was just reminiscing. I was so scared of you. You’d been Marc and I’d just found out you were Alexander Hamilton, the one man who could get access to Dylan McAllister. I couldn’t believe that I’d been that wrong about you.”

“You were scared of me?”

“At the start, yes,” she said honestly. “But you were so great. You waited for me to get comfortable. You didn’t push or insist or force me.”

“Given who my father was and what he did to my mother, forcing a woman is not an option.”

“But I didn’t know that,” she replied. “I still felt safe with you.”

“I made you orgasm in front of a mirror,” I remembered. “That wasn’t pushing?”

She blushed. “I still masturbate to that particular memory,” she admitted. “Maybe you were pushing, but it was the good kind.”

She wasn’t the only one who still masturbated to that particular image. I had only to close my eyes to remember how beautiful she’d looked when lust had replaced her habitual fear, and she’d let herself come with abandon.

She leaned over and held my hand. The plane taxied down the runway and took off. The flight attendants came around once more and offered us some champagne, which she accepted and I declined. The plane reached its flying altitude and the cabin lights dimmed. I reclined back in my seat and put my feet up. Neither of us had got very much sleep last night, and I was looking forward to getting some much-needed rest.  

“Hey, Alexander,” her voice intruded as my eyes were about to close. “Can I ask you a question?”

For a second, I was almost petulant about being disturbed. Then it struck me forcibly that Ellie was here. She’d walked into my life almost four years ago and had managed in the space of one night to be so memorable, so warm and real that I couldn’t get her out of my mind. She was here with me now and if some sacrificed sleep was the price to pay for that, I’d pay it gladly and a hundred times over.

Besides, Ellie had already warned me she had a difficult time falling asleep in public spaces.

“Madame Lorraine is one of your friends, isn’t she?” Her fingers played with her hair as she spoke, a habit that was her own little nervous tic. “Do you think she’s angry because I used her auction to get to you?”

“She doesn’t know the precise details,” I told Ellie. Lori was a good friend, but because of the nature of the world I lived in, very few people were privy to my plans. “She’s well-informed and she might have her suspicions, but very few people even know Dylan is dead. He used to move countries quite often and there was only a small set of people he kept in touch with. The only people that know what happened in Hanoi are you, me and Jean-Luc.”

“How do you know her?”

***

It is pissing down with rain in Bangkok but I don’t care. The weather is an accurate reflection of my mood and besides, I’m inside. I’m ensconced at the bar of Thailand’s best BDSM club, proceeding to drink myself into oblivion.

The cries of that poor woman still haunt me. Pamela in Berlin, Dylan’s second victim, rocking back and forth and begging me not to take her from the brothel she’s spent the last few years of her life in. It has been months and I can’t get them out of my head. I can’t sleep because every time I close my eyes, all I hear is the despairing sound of her sobbing.

I’ve never been closer to shattering into a million little fragile, hopeless pieces.

She doesn’t speak, the doctors caring for her tell me. My well-intentioned gesture – removing her from the Berlin whorehouse - has tarnished the last shining portion of her mind. Now, she weeps silently in her small room in the best psychiatric hospital in Germany. Her grip on reality has loosened.

They try to console me. They tell me that this reaction could not have been predicted. They assure me that there is no consistency in how humans respond to extreme trauma. But I once wanted to be a therapist myself. I read books and devoured scientific journals. I should have been more careful.

Six months ago, I re-established contact with Dylan for the express purpose of finding the women he had kidnapped and tortured. I had thought myself as some kind of knight in shining armour, some kind of guardian angel. I had been a naïve fool.

With Pamela, that ended up backfiring spectacularly. Now I am frozen, unable to act. I’ve managed to uncover the name of Dylan’s next victim, the poor unfortunate woman he took after he’d tired of Pamela. With Jean-Luc’s help, I’ve even managed to locate her. But do I try and save her? What if I just end up repeating my mistake? What if I make things worse?

I signal the bartender. My thoughts have become too bleak, and I seek the all-encompassing fog that alcohol will bring. He places another scotch in front of me and I nod my thanks and tip back the contents of the glass down my throat. It burns all the way down but I don’t care. Soon, I will stop feeling anything.

“If you intend to participate in my auction tomorrow,” an acidly censorious voice speaks next to me, “you should probably stop drinking now.” I turn around, my reactions slowed by the buzzing in my brain and see the infamous Madame Lorraine next to me, her lips pursed tightly, the disapproval coming off her in waves.

I shrug. The only reason I’ve even come this far is to further ingratiate myself with Dylan. It pleases him to think that his son is a chip off the old block, especially after the way I rejected his name and his money when I was eighteen. I’ve managed to convince Dylan that I’ve come around to his way of thinking, enough to at least maintain a rudimentary relationship with him.

To nurture that same relationship, he’d even offered to leverage his connections to procure a woman for me through ‘alternate channels’, as he’d called it.

Alternate channels. My stomach had heaved in revulsion as those words sank in. Dylan was offering to kidnap some poor, unsuspecting girl for me. “No thanks,” I’d replied. “I prefer my girls already trained. I don’t have the patience to get them ready for my needs. Besides,” I laughed, “I like some variety in my pussy. One woman is too boring.”

He’d laughed too and said something about youth and how things would change as I got older. I had to fight back the urge to throw up at the topic we were joking about.

Dylan has never mentioned my mother. He believes that my aunt has merely told me that my mother died in childbirth, leaving me to assume that my mother and Dylan were in a consensual relationship. He’s never brought up the topic and I haven’t either. When I was a child, I was too terrified to talk about my mother. It was the taboo topic of my childhood; the one thing that could never have been referred to.

“Whatever,” I dismiss the woman at my side. “There are a thousand auctions in the world.” I’m being a jerk and I’ve lost the ability to care.

“And yet there’s only one auction that Alexander Hamilton will attend.” She takes a seat next to me. “Or was Anton Nekrasov mistaken?”

Damn it. Right now, in my drunken state, I have no problems burning bridges with this woman with her too-observant eyes. But Anton is a good friend and we go way back. I don’t want to take him down with me. Just like me, he has complicated reasons for the constraints he imposes on his life. This auction is one of the few places he takes refuge in. I can’t, to put it crudely, pee in his well. “No, he isn’t,” I admit. “It matters that the girls aren’t coerced into this.

It more than matters, but the many glasses of Scotch have removed any ability I have to express myself clearly.

“Why?”

Some people know that I’m vaguely associated with Dylan. But I can count on one handful the number of people who know we are related. Madame Lorraine isn’t one of them.  So I spin a half-truth. “My mother was raped once,” I tell her. “I have no desire to be that person.”

“My sister was raped too,” she replies. “Though I daresay you already know that. I’m sure you’ve researched me quite thoroughly. As I have you. Tell me about Pamela Grutzmann.”

Fuck. How can she even know about Pamela? I try and cast my befuddled mind in a net, trying to catch the source of the leak. Ah, of course. The pimp was dead, but the transaction to buy Pamela’s liberty had been between the brothel and me. I’d used a fake name, of course, but it obviously hadn’t been good enough.

Next time, leave no survivors, you stupid idiot, I curse myself.

“She’s not my sex slave. Is that what you are asking me? I’ve already told you I don’t go for that kind of thing.” I close my eyes in despair. Again, Pamela’s sobs echo in my mind. I can’t ever stop hearing them. “She’s in a hospital in Germany.” I tell Lorraine the name of the hospital. “You can confirm it, if you’d like.” The drinking has made me reckless. “Do you want to know why?”

“No.” Her response is quick and firm. “I know where Pamela is. I just wanted to know what you’d tell me.”

So this has been some kind of elaborate trap? I’m not really angry. If anything, I’m reassured. Each little precaution assures me that she is quite serious about who she allows entry into her auction. Of course, Anton has already warned me that a very thorough background check will be carried out.

“Why don’t you want to know?”

“Because I have excellent instincts about people, Alexander. Mine tell me that though you can be trusted, that you also immerse yourself in danger. And I prefer to die of old age.”

***

We were on a plane, flying towards a compound with electrified fences and prowling guard dogs that would tear the flesh off your bones if they were off their leash, and Lori’s words had never been truer.